My usual routine on a trip to Europe has been to limp along on WiFi until I can buy a prepaid SIM (which hopefully will work right away but doesn’t always). But after switching my T-Mobile service from an old small-business plan to a slightly more expensive Simple Choice plan with free 2G roaming, I didn’t have to put up with that workaround.

What I didn’t know before this trip here for Mobile World Congress is if I could stand to spend that much time on an EDGE or slower connection. The limits of T-Mobile’s network in rural areas give me that experience more often than I’d like, and it’s not fun.

But when the alternative is either WiFi alone or having to find a store selling prepaid SIMs–sadly, the one in the arrivals area of Barcelona’s airport seemed to have closed when I arrived Sunday afternoon–slow but free can be not bad.

By “slow” I’m talking a connection that the Speedtest app clocked going no faster than .13 Mbps on a download, .24 on an upload. That’s nowhere near fast enough for sustained use or for work–Monday, I switched to faster bandwidth.

But in the meantime, that EDGE service provided sufficient bandwidth for my e-mail to arrive in the background, to read and write tweets (and even share a picture on Twitter, slowly), to get directions on Google Maps, to check up on Facebook and check in on Foursquare Swarm, and to browse mobile-optimized Web sites with a certain degree of patience.

I’m not alone in that judgment: Ars Technica’s Peter Bright mentioned to me on Monday that he was relying on T-Mobile 2G roaming, and avgeek blogger Seth Miller wrote in 2013 that this free roaming could very well be good enough for short visits.

And even if you’ll still buy a prepaid SIM at your first opportunity overseas, there’s a lot to be said for getting off the plane and not having to freak out over what it will cost you to exit airplane mode before that point.

BARCELONA–I’m here for my third Mobile World Congress. My major discovery so far this time around: I should have flown out Friday evening, so that I could get the falling-asleep-on-the-train phase of jet lag out of the way before the wireless show’s press events kick off.

This post is short this week, on account of my USAT column not having been posted yet. I e-mailed my editor earlier tonight to ask if it got lost in production but haven’t heard back. Update, 3/1: And there it is.

For the first time since last summer, I’m about to depart for a trip without including a smartwatch and its charger in my luggage: I returned the Moto 360 and Samsung Gear Live I’ve been trying out to Google PR on Wednesday.

(I took advantage of having to go to NYC for the day to hand-deliver those Android Wear watches and a few other loaner devices to a Google publicist–less because of the money I’d save on FedEx, more because I wouldn’t have to find a box and enough bubble wrap for all of these things.)

I don’t miss having to charge a smartwatch–always with a proprietary adapter that’s easy to misplace, not easy to replace–every day. But I do miss the soothing sense that if something important happens in my digital life, a device on my wrist will tell me about it and relieve me of the need to grab my phone.

Somebody used the phrase “digital triage” to describe that aspect of smartwatch usage, and that sounds about right: Unlike a beep or a buzz from a phone, the name and subject of an e-mail flashed across a watch’s face tell you instantly if the message is something that demands quick attention or can wait.

That use case seems as compelling to me as it did after two months of trying the Gear Live–maybe more so after I realize how often I was checking my phone during a dinner Thursday night. Fortunately, I was with other tech types, so I’m sure my fellow diners weren’t offended. Much.

And, sure, I once again have to reach for my phone to tell the time.

This trip will take me to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, where I expect to see a new crop of smartwatches–Apple’s excluded, as that company doesn’t show off its products at other people’s events.

Some of them should be thinner and lighter and run longer on a charge than the Motorola and Samsung watches. Some may do away with the need for a proprietary charger, either by accepting a standard micro-USB charger or using wireless charging. Some may even look sharp enough to wear with a suit. With each of those advances, the odds of me buying one of these things will tick forward another notch.

I suppose I should be watching the Oscars now–but first there was dinner, cleaning up and then this little routine. For what it’s worth, I’ve watched a surprisingly high number of this year’s nominees given my father-of-a-toddler status. But aside from The Imitation Game, paying for a ticket at a movie theater wasn’t involved: I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel on a plane (appropriately enough, given all the travel in that flick), watched Unbroken at a Comcast-hosted Newseum screening, saw CitizenFour as part of a security conference, and caught Guardians of the Galaxy and The Lego Movie on DVD.

Maybe I’ll catch up on a few more Oscar-nominated movies during all the air travel I have coming up: Saturday, I depart for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and then after a week at home I’m off to SXSW in Austin.

This get-off-my-screen rant about confusing, contrived pricing schemes for wireless service–basically, I had to vent after the last few updates to the Wirecutter’s guide to wireless carriers–has already yielded some simplification. T-Mobile realized they hadn’t removed a description of an old rate plan from a chart (it’s been replaced with a prepaid plan that’s not nearly as attractive) and updated that. We, in turn, need to add a note about that to our story.

It took me writing this cheat sheet to finally go in and edit my own Google Calendar notification settings so I wouldn’t get pinged via e-mail, in-app and in-browser notifications for an event invitation I hadn’t even responded to, much less accepted.

One of the lesser-known facts about me is that on Fridays during Lent, I don’t almost never eat meat. It’s not that I’m anybody’s idea of a devout Catholic… but several years ago, I thought that giving up meat on Fridays during those 40 days would be a good idea on a few different levels. Somewhat to my surprise, I’ve stuck with it.

The challenge hasn’t so much been going without meat at dinner (except on a Friday in Austin during SXSW, when I feel like a dweeb for making this sacrifice) but figuring out lunch. I am an extreme creature of habit for mid-day meals: Unless I’ve got a lunch date, I make myself a sandwich.

And that sandwich has almost always been built around some sort of cold cuts: ham one week, turkey the next, roast beef afterwards, repeat. Why not? It tastes good (baking my own bread helps), I save money, I can make the sandwich fit my appetite, and having one instead of leftover pasta or whatever reduces the risk of having the same type of food for lunch and dinner.

I could revert to my childhood staple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but they’re not too filling. So what else if the traditional sandwich formula is out? In case this season has put this question in your mind–or you just ran out of cold cuts and need to make something for lunch–here are a few options.

One answer is another childhood favorite, grilled cheese, that’s particularly apt when it’s as cold out as it is now. But not just cheese between two slices of bread; you want to exercise some creativity. Here I have to credit the higher-end grilled-cheese options at Stoney’s in D.C. for making me think about including tomato slices, and I’ve since gotten into the habit of adding such extra ingredients as sautéed onions or apple or pear slices, avocado or garlic-scape pesto. The sandwich at right, photographed after I’d nibbled it into a vague resemblance of D.C.’s outline, features the first two additions on that list as well as whole-grain mustard, and was delicious.

The one downside: There’s actual cooking involved, which means both waiting in front of a hot stove and more stuff to clean up.

Credit for another veggie-sandwich choice goes to the Potomac Pedalers bike club, which on its annual century ride serves up these great cucumber and tomato sandwiches at about the 75-mile mark. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of those rides (can we not talk about my diminished cycling mileage these days?), but the recipe was a keeper. I will often top those thin cucumber and tomato slices with some cream cheese and sautéed bell peppers or caramelized onions. Or you can substitute hummus for the cream cheese.

One potential problem: In the winter, good tomatoes are scarce or expensive, and without one of the two main ingredients this sandwich becomes a little one-dimensional.

My third regular choice on these Fridays is a straightforward ripoff of any good bagel place’s menu: smoked salmon and cream cheese, plus maybe capers or thinly sliced red onions, sautéed or not. (I keep coming back to onions as an accoutrement because they are the easiest thing to cook alongside dinner–either in a pan you’ll later use for another ingredient, or in a foil packet on the grill.) Later in the spring, I can top this with some arugula if my tiny garden has come back to life soon enough.

Awkward issue: Despite all of my efforts, my wife doesn’t like seafood and so remains unconvinced of how awesome this sandwich tastes.

So anyway, hope that helps to diversify your lunch choices. Any other sandwich recipes I should be trying between now and April 5?

(Were you expecting more of the usual earnest musing about journalism or technology? I’ll try to get back to that next week.)

I knew that he wrote like an angel and tolerated no bullshit in his New York Times column, that his honest and humane Twitter presence was one of the better reasons to be on that social network, and that it seemed reasonable to be a little star-struck when my friend Deb Amlen introduced me to her NYT desk-mate during a visit to the Times building last summer. It was only after Carr’s way-too-soon death that I learned of all the unrequired and unadvertised kindness he left behind. Damn.

I’ve been working on my second Wirecutter guide for months, but the initial debut of this review of LTE hotspots last Sunday escaped my notice. The update we pushed out on Wednesday gave me an excuse to talk up the story on social media, so I’ll just call that this guide’s publication date for the purposes of this post.

When I got the reader e-mail that led to this column, I thought I’d covered the topic somewhat recently. Nowhere near true: The piece I had in mind ran in 2006, which may explain why researching my correspondent’s query led me to an OS X feature that I had no idea existed.

On one hand, I’ve seen a variety of reader reports–more in reader e-mail and in comments on the post I wrote here first to see if this was a wider problem as well as on the Facebook page post in which I shared the column than in comments on the column itself–of other Verizon login failures.

On the other hand, Verizon is now thinking that this is related to my using LastPass. My PR contact there said that one of his colleagues had noticed the screenshot in my post here revealed that I use that password-manager service and suggested I try disabling its extension in the problematic copy of Safari.

I thought that a somewhat ridiculous suggestion, since each time I’d typed in the password instead of letting LastPass enter it for me. But once I did that, I could log in normally. And when I enabled it again, I got the same login failure as before. There’s correlation here. Causation? I don’t know.

I e-mailed LastPass’s CEO Joe Siegrist (not because I thought this a CEO-level issue, but because we met a few years ago and I’ve always found him quick to reply to a query) to ask his people to look into things.

If they can reproduce and, better yet, document a problematic interaction, that would be good to know and a good thing to add to the column. If they can’t (a distinct possibility considering that the guy I quoted in the column having a similar problem, PhoneScoop editor Rich Brome, told me he doesn’t use LastPass), the mystery will continue.

In the meantime, I’ll throw this question out there: If you use LastPass, have you seen any other cases of a login with a valid password failing?